Summary
Developing and Practicing Listening and Speaking Skills
Overview of Listening and Speaking Skills in Language Learning
To speak and listen fluently and accurately in a second language, language learners need to be able to comprehend and produce-in a native-like fashion- stress, intonation, rhythm, pacing, gestures, and body language, and they need both linguistic and sociolinguistic competence (Florez, 1999). For practicing and developing skills, Peregoy and Boyle (2001) recommend activities such as singing, role-playing, dramatizing poetry, doing show and tell, tape recording children’s books, and choral reading.
Florez (1999) notes that “opportunities for speaking and listening require structure and planning if they are to support language development”, and carefully planned CALL activities can use computers to support listening and speaking. For example, computer technologies can assist students to interact with other English language learners and with native speakers in many different forums not only to practice but also to develop listening and speaking skills. Cary (2000) notes that computers can also “get reluctant speakers to speak English”(p.36) by providing them with increased opportunities, less teacher fronting, and the authentic and challenging situations that Cary recommends.
Two basic CALL structures promote learner speaking and listening as part of social interaction. Learners can speak around the computer, or learners can speak through the computer. In addition, some software programs provide learners with opportunities to speak with the computer. When designing technology-supported language learning tasks, teachers can use one or more of these structures as appropriate for learners. Examples of these three types of tasks are presented in the following sections.
Listening and Speaking Around the Computer
Learners can work around the computer with learners at their own level to obtain and practice basic skills. They can work with the plethora of listening exercises provided by Web sites such as The Internet TESL Journal, Renata’s ESL/CALL Corner, or Dave’s ESL Café (http://www.eslcafe.com/).
More advanced students can listen to news stories and read the text at the same time at the National Public Radio site (http://www.npr.org) or practice with idioms, pronunciation, spoken grammar and more at Adam Rado’s English Learning Fun Site (ELFS) (http://www.elfs.com/).
These sites benefit students by providing content that enables them to interact with one another; in other words, the listening and speaking that students do around the computer when they talk about the listening and speaking exercises reinforces and provides practice for the concepts under study.
Many content-based software programs written for ESL learners and native speakers have built-in interaction structures that require students to interact around the computer to complete a task. One example is Who is Oscar Lake? (available from http://www.languagepub.com/) which provides live action video to help learners solve a mystery.
Working around the computer allows learners to test their language and content hypotheses with peers, to learn pragmatic skills before taking them outside of the classroom, and to have some control over how and when they participate.
Listening and Speaking Through the Computer
When learners are capable of interacting with more fluent speakers, they can use the computer as a conduit to native speakers and more advanced second language learners around the world. Voice chat and audio e-mail can be modified to work efficiently and effectively for a wide range of classrooms that have access. Learners can practice speaking and listening through the computer by recording audio segments in book-making software or in presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint, and they can even trade suggestions for essay revision in versions of Microsoft Word that have audio commenting capabilities. A major benefit of this task structure is that learners can interact socially and receive authentic oral input from peers and others.
Listening and Speaking With the Computer
Opportunities for learners to work interactively with the computer on listening and speaking are relatively rare because the computer cannot respond creatively or provide individualized feedback. However, several companies provide products that approach this goal, either dictation software or integrated learning systems such as Rosetta Stone (n.v.).
The Rosetta Stone software models native speaker pronunciation aurally that learners listen to and repeat. Another aspect of the system checks learner’s writing after they produce a dictated passage.
As electronic technologies become more advanced, students will be able to work with the computer as a learning partner instead of working around and through it as a tool.
Supporting Listening and Speaking
1. Provide opportunities for students to notice.
Noticing (Schmidt, 2001) is important during reading and writing but to produce fluent and comprehensible speech and to react appropriately to the others’ speech, students also need to notice their own linguistic errors.
2. Include pragmatics in lessons.
Teachers can use any of the language modes to teach norms of social appropriateness in the target language culture if they make noticing these features a lesson objective. Although communication through the computer such as text and voice chatting can provide only limited pragmatic and sociocultural information, using the computer for these activities is similar pragmatically to using the telephone, another essential skill for many students.
Tips for Designing Opportunities for Skill Development
In addition to promoting noticing and teaching pragmatics, teachers can help students learn to listen and speak by giving them time to talk to each other every day (Peregory and Boyle, 2001). Peer interaction provides practice in listening, speaking, and negotiating that learners otherwise might not get. Learners can develop speaking, listening, and oral grammar skills through direct instruction or by participating in content or whole tasks, but most important is that learners have opportunities to practice in a variety of authentic venues.
Technologies for Listening and Speaking
Florez (1999) provides a framework for listening and speaking lessons by noting that such lessons “can follow the usual pattern of preparation, presentation, practice, evaluation, and extension” (p. 2). These steps generally include telling students what the goals of the activity are, making sure that they have the skills necessary to perform it, working with the target skill or framework to focus the lesson on language learning while integrating technology where it supports language learning most effectively and efficiently.
Example
Lesson: Jazz chants online
Focus: Rhythm in oral English, adverbs of frequency, computer parts vocabulary, stress, pronunciation.
Preparation: Write a sentence on the board and review the terms stress, intonation, and rhythm. Discuss with students how these aspects in the target language may differ from these same aspects in their first language. Students can do some of the pronunciation exercises in One Stop Magazine alone in groups; then the class can practice with several sentences, marking the word stress and intonation patterns.
Presentation: Find “My computer’s crashed” chant at the One Stop English site (Macmillan Publishers, 2004a). Print or copy the script for each student. Students listen to the recording on the Web site as they mark the stress and intonation patterns and take notes on any pronunciation aspects that they need. Students can listen as many times as they need to. They compare their marks with one or more classmates and then the whole class corrects the marks on their scripts together.
Practice: Students practice the chant orally in groups or individually, and student listeners mark a script for student speakers to show the stress and intonation used. Speakers can then compare their performance to the corrected script.
Evaluation: Students can listen to, mark, and practice another chant from the Web site.
Extension: Learners pick a topic and find a partner. With their partner, learners then develop a jazz chant for the topic. They can record their chant for future class exercises, or they can present it to the class for evaluation and discussion.
This activity provides learners with ample scaffolding and modeling, authentic audiences for their interaction, and many choices in their extension activity. In other words, this activity meets many of the conditions for language learning.
Conclusion
Many of the activities through this book support listening and speaking and meet conditions for language learning. These exercises and activities are only a small portion of those available for teachers and learners.
